The unlived life

What a glorious Good Friday.

I think my cold is on its way out, and if I hadn't had a tight deadline this morning I would have loved to expand my mile-and-a-third into a two, three or even five-miler.

I read something that I really like in one of the many different books that I'm dipping in and out of at the moment, this one is "The War of Art - Winning the Inner Creative Battle" by Steven Pressfield. I'm reading it on the Kindle application on my iPhone, which I'm quite enjoying using.

The phrase that I like is "Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance".

I identified with this immediately.

For most of my adult life, this phrase was, and also felt very strongly that it was, an almost uncanny description of my life.

These days I wouldn't have said it was true, until when I thought about it a little more, I realised that, while not as extreme as it used to be, there is still some truth in this for me.

I remember when I wrote me very first coaching tip back in 2004, I titled it "If I'm doing what I love, how come it's scary" (I hadn't got the hang of shorter clearer titles in those days).

I had an expectation back then that when I'd been coaching for a while and felt that I'd really got it, then it wouldn't be scary.

Now I know that scariness is actually a measure of how well I'm doing. If I'm not scared, then I am too comfortable, I'm simply retreading the well-trodden path without thinking too much, I don't have the energy of pushing past my own boundaries.

Scariness is good, and should always be there to keep me on my toes.

But while I'm living much more of my unlived life now, there is still more of it as yet unlived. And resistance is absolutely what is stopping me living it.

In the last few days I have been becoming more aware of what I think this unlived part of my life is.

My next step is to recognise my resistance, challenge it head on, and welcome the extra scariness that will come with pushing past it.

As Steven Pressfield says, in another of his books that I'm reading, I have to "Do the Work"!